


Remember, you are not alone

by sockablock



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, But mostly fluff, Canon-adjacent, Fluff, Gen, also i cried when i wrote the ending so, if Molly didn't remember the m9 when he awoke, whoops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-13 21:07:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16479785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sockablock/pseuds/sockablock
Summary: Nott tugs on his sleeve and asks, “Are you sure you’re okay to travel? If you don’t want to go all the way out, yet, we could wait a little longer.”Molly takes a shot in the dark.“When have I ever been someone who liked waiting around?”(or: the Mighty Nein bring Molly back without any memories, but in True Molly Fashion, he decides not to tell them)





	Remember, you are not alone

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this post](http://sweet-tart.tumblr.com/post/176174251011/ppl-talk-about-how-angsty-it-would-be-if-molly) which I read, and immediately entered a fugue state to write about

There are tears, of course. They sting the cuts and scrapes and bruises that nobody had bothered to stop and heal in their frantic scramble to make it to the woods before any more time had been lost.

Then there is laughter, and relief, and joy as they help him sit up, as they drape him in love, as they pull him in close and brush his hair aside and sob into his shoulders and chest and arm— _we’re so sorry it took this long, we’re so sorry we had to move on, we’re so sorry, we’re so sorry, we’re so sorry._

And then they hand him his coat. They see his soft but bewildered smile. Slowly, eventually, they fill him in on what he’d missed.

\-----------------

A few hours pass.

“What do you guys want to do now?” Beau asks as their cart bounces along the path. “I feel like we need a vacation, or something.”

“First we should make sure the Gentleman doesn’t have anything urgent,” sighs Fjord. “It’s been a while since we checked in with him.”

“I wouldn’t mind stopping in Zadash,” Caduceus rumbles from the front of the wagon. “It’s been a bit since we saw Mister Sol.”

“Agreed,” Caleb says. “I need more paper.”

Beau rolls her eyes, pokes him in the arm with her staff. “You _always_ need more paper.”

Jester cuts in before he can respond, waves her hands around excitedly and grins with delight. “We can get baths again!” she declares. “ _Real_ baths, too!”

“No thanks,” Nott says immediately. “Count me out.”

Molly, seated in the corner holding his coat in his arms, glances up at Nott with a raised eyebrow. “Why not? Don’t you want to get clean?”

She rolls her eyes, turns around to ignore him. “Don’t try me like that,” she grumbles. “You _know_ I hate water.”

Molly hesitates for just a moment, so briefly that no one really notices. “Well then,” he shrugs, “it was worth a shot.”

 -----------------

That night, they make camp in a small forest clearing, on a patch of green grass as the sun sets above. Caleb spends most of the time standing off to the side, watching Jester and Beau unpack, grumbling faintly to himself about how he’d go buy components immediately, how all he needs now is the ivory, how easy it would be to slip away into a mansion and forget about their troubles for an evening.

Beau tells him how suggestive that sounds, and Caleb’s face does that charming thing where it goes faintly red and shuts down.

Molly, in an attempt to be helpful, approaches him with a smile.

“Why don’t we set up a fire together?” he volunteers, gesturing to the logs Fjord had stacked in a pit. “I found some flint in my pocket, and the wind isn’t too bad right now.”

Caleb stares at him. He stares and he stares and he continues to stare, until Molly’s heart starts to jump and he wonders if he’d said something wrong.

And then Caleb extends a finger towards the pit, waves his wrist around slowly, and in a flash the logs burst into flame and a cloud of crackling smoke blooms up into the air above them.

“Hey, give a little more warning!” Jester calls. “You nearly got my dress!”

Instead of responding, Caleb puts a kind hand on Molly’s shoulder.

“You should get some rest,” he says gently. “You have been through a lot today.”

Molly can’t argue with that. After a while, he goes over to Caduceus, who’d begun to lay out dried meats and strange fruits for dinner.

“You can’t make fire with your mind, can you?” he asks.

Caduceus seems to consider this for a moment.

“Only a bit,” he says eventually. “But most of it is divine fire, so not good for camps. Want an apple?”

Molly does.

 -----------------

Fjord sticks his head into the tent and immediately sees a pair of glowing red eyes peer up at him in the darkness. He starts, but only slightly, and rubs the back of his neck sheepishly as he squeezes in under the flap.

“Sorry,” he whispers, not very quietly. “I sort of forgot that your eyes do that.”

“Do what?” Molly asks.

“You know. Light up at night, and stuff.”

“Oh. Er…sorry.”

“It’s fine,” and here Fjord waves a dismissive hand. “I’ll get used to it again. I did the first time, didn’t I?”

There’s a pause, and then Molly grins and nods. “You sure did,” he says. “Good to have you back.”

Fjord doesn’t even hesitate to pull him into a hug. Molly does a good job not flinching away from the sudden contact, even rests a calm hand on the back of Fjord’s head after a moment.

“I missed you, Mol,” the half-orc murmurs. “It wasn’t the same without you.”

Molly searches frantically for something to say. He settles on:

“I would say it wasn’t the same for me either, but I wasn’t exactly awake during it all, was I?”

Fjord laughs into his shoulder. It’s a warm feeling.

“No,” he agrees. “You certainly were not.”

 -----------------

The city of Zadash is bright, and massive, and noisy, and colorful. The enormous gates that greet them at the walls part slowly as their cart approaches, and Molly barely has time to take in the hanging tapestries, then stern guards, the cacophony of sensation all around as they move beneath the archways like they’d done so a thousand times before.

Molly is entranced. He leans in towards Jester, and whispers in her ear.

“Has it changed at all since I’ve been here?”

Her eyes glitter when she grins back at him. “There’s a new pastry shop,” she whispers back. “And the dirty bookstore’s owner got published.”

She says this as if it’s all he needs to know.

He sits back, glances at the squat houses beside him, at the sprawling storefronts all around, peers as closely as he can towards the three enormous towers looming high up in the distant skyline beyond.

He thinks he’ll like this city. He thinks he’ll definitely need to check out that shop.

 -----------------

A woman with the face of a cat collides into him as he reaches the bottom of the stairs.

There’s a moment, where the two of them just stare at one another—Molly with amazement at this fascinating new stranger, the woman with astonished, wide-eyed shock and an expression that threatens to burst into tears.

Then she throws herself into his arms and buries her face into his shoulder.

Strangely, his friends look just as confused as he feels.

He takes this into stride. He slings an arm around her shoulders, offers to buy her a drink.

She doesn’t even seem bothered when he realizes he has no money.

 -----------------

The Gentleman, and _what_ a gentleman he is, offers to give them a job.

The group consider it for a few moments, and at one point the conversation lulls and Nott tugs on his sleeve and asks, “Are you sure you’re okay to travel? If you don’t want to go all the way out, yet, we could wait a little longer.”

Molly takes a shot in the dark.

“When have I _ever_ been someone who liked waiting around?”

They accept the job.

 -----------------

It is a few weeks later, at night, in a tavern somewhere south of the Zemni Fields. Molly isn’t exactly sure where, but that hasn’t bothered him yet.

He is sitting on the bed, listening to Fjord gently snore from the ground. Slowly, he reaches into a pocket on the brilliant, dazzling coat, and carefully produces the small slip of paper that he’d carried with him since waking up on that day in the woods to a group full of teary strangers.

He holds it up to the moonlight. And though he’d had trouble reading them at first, the words on this page are now almost more familiar than his own name.

They say:

 _Go south and find the Gentleman. You are not alone, you will have friends there. You are Mollymauk Tealeaf, and the Mighty Nein will be waiting for you, whenever you are ready_.

_Remember, you are not alone. You have friends, who will never stop waiting._

“Your name is Mollymauk Tealeaf,” he murmurs softly to himself, as he did every night since waking up on that day in the woods to a group full of teary strangers. He glances at the man sleeping on the floor, and nods in the gentle darkness.

“These people are the Mighty Nein,” he whispers. “They are friends, and they didn’t stop waiting.”

After a while, he tucks the note back into his pocket.

He kicks his shoes off, and flops down onto the mattress, and after a while, sleep finds him.

 -----------------

Someone else finds him.

That morning, as they sit in the tavern waiting for a storm to settle before heading out into the ruins they were meant to clear, the door flies open and a woman emerges from the tempest.

She has to duck to fit beneath the entrance, carefully balancing the bag hanging off her shoulder, dripping rainwater off her massive mane of thick, braided hair and onto the wooden floorboards.

When she gives a cursory glance around the barroom, looking for the innkeeper, her eyes instead settle on a motley crew sitting around a table tucked neatly into the corner.

She drops her bag.

Her eyes go wide.

She runs toward them.

Eventually the hug breaks, and her tears quickly dry. She gives him a pat on the head, her hand gentle in his hair, and she warns him never to do that again.

He agrees. And he isn’t even sure what her name is, at first, until Beau complains that Yasha had been gone for much too long, this time.

 -----------------

But Molly remembers how desperately she had clung to his back, and he remembers the way her shoulders just couldn’t stop shaking.

The first chance he gets—though he isn’t _entirely_ sure why—he finds a pretty-looking wildflower and offers it to her.

 -----------------

“That Molly is an interesting one, isn’t he?” Caduceus remarks quietly to Caleb as they trudge through the crumbling, dusty, underground corridor.

“What do you mean?” Caleb has his diamond clutched in one hand, his glowing spheres being guided by the other.

“He just seems a little scattered,” Caduceus shrugs. “Like he isn’t all quite there.”

“The same could be said for any of us,” Caleb mutters. “He has been dead for a while, it is understandable. At least he is not a zombie, eh?”

Caduceus’s face is a mask of grim solemnity. “If he was,” he says quietly, “I would destroy him.”

Neither of them talk much, after that.

 -----------------

And an honestly shocking amount of time passes before the truth comes out.

It happens after the mission, after Molly had intercepted a blow meant for a fleeing Nott, after Molly had nearly died (again) at the hands of a particularly enraged and furious clay war golem, after Caduceus had plopped him back on his feet and warned him to be more careful next time.  

It happens at the back of the cart, as they now bound gently back up the Amber Road, back towards the city Molly had fallen in love with during their short time there.

It happens as most of the group nap peacefully under the midday sun, with Fjord at the reins and Nott keeping an eye out for trouble.

It happens when Jester stirs from her sleep, when she yawns hugely and stretches her arms out, when she glances drowsily around her and sees Molly rummaging through his things, taking stock of his possessions, swords resting gently on the ground and tarot deck placed carefully at his knee.

She beams at him.

“Hey, Molly! It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Can you tell me a fortune?”

For a moment, Molly’s face doesn’t change. And then he manages a grin, and bows his head graciously.

“But of course, dear. It would be a pleasure.”

She scoots up off the bench and plops down into the empty space beside him.

She gives him an expectant look.

He picks up the cards, and winks.

Luckily, muscle memory is enough to get him through the shuffling. His fingers dance across the edges of the cards with a practitioner’s ease, as if he had done this a thousand times before. Of course, given her words and the strangely familiar way the gold inlay glints under the sun, Molly can only assume that he had.

And then his hands come to stop.

He doesn’t know what comes next.

Thank the gods, Jester seems to. Without even prompting, she reaches out and plucks the first card off the top of his deck.

She holds it up for both of them to see.

It depicts an anvil, shining in the light, stoic and sturdy in the palm of her hands.

Molly, without even a pause, nods knowingly. “I see, I see…the anvil. Well, that’s good news for you, dear! It means you are strong, and resolute, and you have a determination in your—”

“That’s wrong,” says Yasha.

They both turn to look at her. She had been resting at the back of the cart, eyes closed and arms folded, but is now staring at Molly with a sharp look of intense, unwavering confusion.

The clouds drift gently overhead in the silence.

And then Molly says:

“Excuse me?”

Yasha’s arms unfold. She straightens up and leans forward.

“That is not what the Anvil is. Mollymauk…did you forget?”

Jester’s expression is also vaguely puzzled. She taps lightly on her chin. “Yasha’s right,” she says slowly. “I’ve gotten this one before. You said…you said that it was a ‘destiny forged.’”

There is a long, long moment, that feels like a lifetime drawn into a second.

And then without even breaking eye contact, Yasha motions slowly towards the cards.

“Draw another,” she says. “Tell us what it means.”

Jester does so, and holds up the Serpent.

Molly swallows, and gives his answer.

 -----------------

They park the wagon along the side of the road. As the horses begin to graze in the tall grass around them, the Mighty Nein all sit on one side of the cart and stare incredulously at Molly, who is seated alone at the other.

“I can’t believe you didn’t _say_ anything,” Fjord sighs eventually. “I mean…it’s been _weeks_.”

“Almost a month,” Beau adds. “Seriously, M—actually, should we even still be _calling_ you that?”

Molly shrugs helplessly, shakes his head and raises his hands. “I dunno,” he says. “I don’t know what else you _could_ call me.”

“Lucien,” Nott volunteers, as if that’s supposed to mean something.

“Or Nonagon,” Caleb adds.

“They said you were a performer,” Caduceus tries. “We could try to come up with a stage name.”

Molly sighs. “I have no idea what any of you are talking about.”

And then Jester raises a hand. Wearily, Molly nods.

She lowers her hand. She leans in towards him.

“What do you remember?”

He taps on his chin. He gazes up, and around, and back. And then he shrugs.

“My first memory is waking up in the grass with the sun shining over me,” he says. “It was…warm, with a few clouds in the sky. My…shirt was rather filthy? And you lot were there, sitting around me and crying.”

They are quiet for a moment.

And then Caleb starts to laugh. When they turn to frown at him, Molly included, waiting for an explanation, Caleb shakes his head and rubs his face and the smile he gives Molly is almost enough to calm his frantic heart.

“Your first memory used to be waking up in the earth,” he explains through shaky breaths. “You-you used to tell us that you had to claw your way through the dirt to breathe your first breath. That you emerged in the night, all by yourself, and that all you felt was emptiness.”

Slowly, very slowly, Yasha leans forward. There are tears hanging from the corner of her eyes.

Her voice is soft, on the edge of breaking:

“This time, you were not alone.”  

\-----------------

He is not, exactly, Mollymauk Tealeaf. And yet—as his friends almost overturn the cart to throw themselves forward and wrap him up in a hug; as they cry again for the second time in his extraordinarily short life; as they nod and agree and apologize for their questions; as he says that if it counts for anything, he’s beyond grateful that they’d met; as one in particular says he’s still just as annoying as he used to be, as another says that she doesn’t _actually_ mean it; as they all laugh and sob and eventually pull away and get themselves and the cart all moving on again—maybe, just maybe, he _is_ Mollymauk Tealeaf.

And perhaps even more importantly than that, he is not alone. He has friends, as it turns out. Friends who were there when he awoke, who were there as he went south, who are here with him right now as they bounce along the beaten trail of the long-traveled Amber Road, the midday sun shining gently down on them all.  

They are the Mighty Nein.

And now, they can finally stop waiting.  

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!! As always, Comments and Kudos keep me going, and if you enjoyed this piece, please share it with a friend! I've got more stuff on my tumblr [@sockablock](https://www.sockablock.tumblr.com), and feel free to hit me up there!!


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